Personal
A couple of recent articles discussing the environmental impact of meat production:
Vegetarian is the new Prius. (Alternet)
Pork’s Dirty Secret (Rolling Stone)
And check out the Unhappy Meals article in the linkblog in the sidebar. A great analysis of where we’ve gone wrong with our Western diet.
(paraphrased from a bumper sticker seen this morning)
I will be happy when schools have all the money they need to educate our children and the military has to hold fetes and garage sales to buy bombs.
Why, as a society, do we get our priorities so completely backwards?
My recipe for cutting your shower to two minutes while still enjoying it. This will save a lot of water and help you to feel really good about yourself.
Optional extras:
a. To reduce water consumption: shave your head. No need to shampoo, condition or blow-dry. And no bad-hair days!
b. Purchase a shower timer. Approx $10-15 from your local hardware store.
c. Use a Rinnai Infinity instantaneous gas hot water service. This lets you set the hot water temperature – to the degree – which means that you don’t have to mix hot and cold, nor do you heat the water to 60-70deg and then cool it back down again. Or better yet, get solar hot water.
Now, to the recipe:
Additional water-saving tips:
I managed to have a fantastic shower while camping recently using a bucket and about 7-8 litres of rainwater, using essentially the steps above.
Next task: to convince lunatic farmers that inland Australia is not an appropriate place to grow rice! Sheesh…
Back from 5 weeks vacation, camping in National Parks, caravan parks and friend’s backyards, and visiting friends and family. We all had an amazing time that I’ll write about over the coming weeks.
Returning home was surprising – our home of nine years looked eerily unfamiliar even though nothing had changed. I think that there’s a length of time, perhaps about two or three weeks, that is the length of your ‘now’. ‘Recent memory’, if you like. Most vacations aren’t long enough to reach that point, so you don’t get such a disruptive experience when you return to normal life. But I definitely went beyond that point with this holiday.
We drove back into Melbourne late on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was taken aback by the sheer number of people, their pace, and what seemed to me to be the tunnels of vision that they were racing down. The pace out in the countryside is definitely slower and people seem to look around them as they go about their day. Maybe it’s just me and the fact that I’ve been spending weeks marvelling over the size of the country and the sky – we really don’t have much sky in the city – but it was something I noticed immediately.
But it is good to be back in our comfortable beds, good to be able to go to the market and get a proper range of fruit and veg (and at reasonable prices!), and just enjoy all the things that were familiar before we left and are becoming familiar again.
And I’ve got a lot of gardening to do…
It’s finished now (and so is the mo!), but I participated in Movember, to raise awareness and research funding for prostate cancer and male depression. It’s not too late to sponsor me for this good cause. I’m up to $730 $780 $790 $890 at last count – thanks especially to Werribee Nissan for their generous donation. So help me to go over the $1000! Don’t forget to use my sponsor ID of 45671.
And yes, that’s about as good as it gets 🙂
